I had an assignment this weekend to shoot preserved insects as if in a museum display collection. Dead bugs aren’t normally my thing, but there’s something to be said about subjects that stay put and allow me to arrange lighting without scurrying off. I pinned the insects in foam-bottomed trays and reflected the strobe off an overhead white board. More photos below.

Mikey– nope! Beetles come with their own built-in high-gloss wax coating, and the most colorful ones above (blue Eupholus weevils, green Chrysina scarabs, etc) get their colors not from pigments but from nanoscale photonic crystals made of chitin. That’s why pigment-colored things like ladybugs lose their colors after death, but structurally-colored species will stay iridescent as long as the specimen lasts.

Alex, these are gorgeous– masterful blurring-out of the labels in the Hymenoptera picture. 🙂